Opinion: Guest Opinions

From left, Boulder County Commissioners Deb Gardner, Elise Jones and Cindy Domenico during a 2013 discussion at the Boulder County Courthouse. (Mark Leffingwell / Daily Camera)

Anyone browsing social media on April 1 likely saw this quote: "April Fool's Day is the one day of the year when people critically evaluate things they find on the internet before believing them to be true." While we've all come to accept that some of our friends and family are susceptible to urban legends and demonstrably untrue internet memes, we have a right to hold our elected leaders to a higher standard — particularly when our tax dollars and the future of our open space land is at stake.

Commissioners Gardner and Jones recently engaged in a particularly blatant demonstration of fact-averse policy making. When faced with the question of continuing to allow the planting of genetically-engineered seed on open-space agricultural land, there was an evidence-based path available to the commissioners. The county staff had gathered local data on the sustainability impacts of various cropping systems, presented to the commissioners as a white paper. Both CU and CSU are home to many well-respected, independent scientific experts ready and able to discuss recent research, global scientific consensus, and otherwise help separate the wheat from the chaff — so to speak — when sifting through the mountain of scientific data.

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Instead, these two commissioners fully ignored the results of their own staff's data collection, presumably because it demonstrated that genetically-engineered cropping systems fared far better in sustainability measures than organic cropping systems. In contrast to the 2011 process that created Boulder County's cropland policy, this board of commissioners made no attempt to reach out proactively to the local scientific community. At the invitation of the county's farmers (and out of their own desire to see policy based on the best scientific evidence) some of our local academic experts did speak with the commissioners, providing peer-reviewed studies and answering any and all questions the commissioners posed to them.

Unfortunately, it appears that the effort to communicate solid science to these two commissioners was in vain. This became apparent during the commissioners' public comments prior to their directive mandating a transition away from genetically-engineered crops on county land. For example, Commissioner Jones repeated the misleading myth that glyphosate (an herbicide) was found to be a probable carcinogen, even after multiple local academics explained to her why that statement is not supported by the overall body of research, and that contextually glyphosate is less carcinogenic than Jones' daily cup of coffee. We seem to have entered the era of policymaking by internet meme.

The comedian John Oliver recently tackled the problem of false balance in the media's coverage of climate change. The central thesis of Oliver's wildly popular video was that we do science — and common sense — a disservice when we disregard the value of global scientific consensus (based on a large and diverse body of research) and instead present unsubstantiated, retracted, or fringe studies as having equal weight. We shouldn't be regarding the climate change "debate" as a discussion between two equal sides, Oliver said, but instead should make things statistically representative by flooding the debate stage with scientists that recognize the reality of climate change.

The scientific consensus about the safety of GMOs is even stronger (at 88 percent) than the consensus about human-made global warming (87 percent). When it comes to additional questions regarding the safety of various agricultural products like glyphosate, there is also significant scientific research to guide sensible decision-making.

The contrast in scientific support for Boulder's local GMO issue has been made apparent in the Daily Camera's editorial pages, where recently over two dozen members of CU's MCD Biology Department joined two professors and a Ph.D. in signing a letter critical of the commissioners' decision to mandate a transition away from GMO crops. In comparison, letters opposing GMOs have been full of inaccuracies and misstatements that expose a lack of basic understanding of the issue, as has been pointed out by many in those letters' online comments.

It should be easy to dismiss internet rumors as wholly irrelevant to the serious work of governing, but unfortunately it seems that the majority of our commissioners don't care to separate fact from fiction. The people of Boulder County deserve better than unscientific, politically motivated, anti-technology mandates. They should expect responsible, thoughtful processes that look both to the global scientific data and to the local applicability of any new idea they're considering — such as the proposed upheaval of the county's successful farming program.

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